With Dark Souls: Remastered fast approaching, I've spent the past few evenings exploring (read: repeatedly dying in) FTRicher's Prepare to Die Again mod. By relocating the base game's enemies, NPCs, bonfires and items, this ambitious undertaking creates a whole new Dark Souls experience. The creator's next project is a similarly bold work-in-progress venture that draws from Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Named The Breath of the Soul, FTRicher's latest adds new items by way of buffs and healing components. It allows weapons to be upgraded, but only by virtue of souls. It makes changes to the movesets of certain weapons. It employs new starting classes, and new starting gifts. It makes enemies drop weapons more frequently. And, the biggie, it makes the map more explorable from the outset.
In turn, the latter makes more of the game optional, at the expense of, potentially, a bastard-hard run-in with Gwyn—similar to how Ganon can be pursued from the off in Breath of the Wild.
At present, The Breath of the Soul has a ways to go, but FTRicher promises new vendor inventories, tweaked spells, adjustments to level spawns (similar to Prepare to Die Again), and "level-based events" among other things down the line.
More information—including a checklist of what's already done, what's underway and what's still to be tackled—can be found via the mod's Nexus page.
It's not the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice 2 I'd hoped for, but Elden Ring: Nightreign might just sate my insatiable hunger for FromSoftware to pick up the pace
FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki says the studio doesn't 'have any particular plans to develop Elden Ring 2', but that doesn't mean the 'Elden Ring IP' is over
